Adam & Eve Declassified

Hey, True Weirdos, we just wanted to take a minute and thank you so much for your support. True Weird Stuff has won the Best History Podcast and the Women in Podcasting Awards, and we've also won a Signal Award in the Paranormal category, plus a Communicator Award for Excellence for Writing for Audio and Voice. And that's only happened because of you, our fellow strange people. Thanks. Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation. The CIA has always had its hands in some murky and strange business, hallucinogenic drugs, ludicrous notions. I mean, come on, trying to use house cats as secret agents during the Cold War? Bizarre and sometimes terrible and deadly experiments on human beings.

The CIA has long gone far beyond the usual sorts of intrigues and lies to be expected in an organization of spies. But this, this seems peculiar even for them. Why did the CIA drop the hammer on a book written in the 1960s, a book called The Adam and Eve Story? And by drop the hammer, I mean they classified it and kept it locked up tight until the year 2013.

And even then, the CIA only permitted parts of the book to be declassified, declassified and sanitized, to use the CIA's preferred terminology, with a rumble so low as to be inaudible, growing, throbbing, then fuming into a thundering roar, the earth shakes, only it's not like any earthquake in recorded history. What had the author of the book, Chan Thomas, revealed either accidentally or on purpose? In California, the mountains shake like ferns in a breeze. The mighty Pacific rears back and piles up into a mountain of water more than two miles high, then starts its race eastward. Why would the CIA care about some random book and care enough to bury it for almost 50 years? And even then, even when they did allow it to go public, it had to first be sanitized? With a force of a thousand armies, the winds attack, ripping, shredding everything in its supersonic bombardment. The unbelievable mountain of Pacific seawater follows the wind eastward, burrowing Los Angeles and San Francisco as if they were but grains of sand. I mean, that does sound very bad and all, but aren't there literally thousands of books describing how the world might end? The CIA has never shown any interest in any of those.

So why this one? Nothing but nothing stops the relentless, overwhelming onslaught of wind and ocean. Was it just down to the CIA's post-war and Cold War weirdness? Or was there something in that book they genuinely feared the public knowing? Something that might destabilize society, make us unruly and impossible to govern? What kind of information could do that?

Could convince us that everything we'd ever been told was a lie? True weird stuff. Across the continent, the thousand-mile-per-hour wind wreaks its unholy vengeance everywhere, mercilessly, unceasingly. Every living thing is ripped into shreds while being blown across the countryside, and the earthquake leaves no place untouched. In many places, the Earth's sublayer breaks through and spreads a sea of white-hot liquid fire to add to the Holocaust.

The Adam and Eve story is a book about global cataclysm, and I bet you're hoping now that it's fiction. I think we all are. It's not, though, and the author wasn't crazy. His name was Dr. Chauncey Powers Thomas, a scientist and an engineer born in Clay, Missouri in February 1920. He preferred being called Chan to Chauncey. He's one of those people that you might want to call a kook, but then you dig a little and you find that his resume is loaded with serious grown-up kinds of jobs. Chan Thomas served as a project engineer on the Bell Aircraft Rascal Missile Guidance System. He worked with Douglas Aircraft on the A-4D Skyhawk program.

McDonnell Douglas tapped him in the late 1960s to join the secretive Advanced Concepts Research and Development team. Led by a physicist named Dr. Robert Wood, Advanced Concepts was actually even more advanced than anyone knew. We're talking technologies from another world. UFOs. Physicist Dr. Robert Wood was a real-deal scientist, so brilliant that McDonnell Douglas encouraged him to put together a research team to answer the question of how exactly UFOs were able to get here to Earth at all. The project ended after two years with no real definitive results, but by that point Dr. Wood had seen and heard enough to declare himself a believer.

Wood said that he'd come to the conclusion that the entire UFO phenomenon was no joke. There were just too many credible eyewitnesses. One of the most intriguing UFO accounts Wood has investigated was reported in 1965 by Orange County Highway Inspector Rex Heflin. Wood ranks it as the county's most significant UFO sighting to date. Wood said during his normal routine somewhere near Dyer and Myford roads, Heflin saw this craft right in front of his windshield. He had a loaded Polaroid camera on his front seat because that was his job, to photograph things that needed to be fixed. So he took a shot right through his front window.

Heflin took three photos before the hat-shaped UFO left the area. He drove farther and then got out and took a picture of the smoke ring that was left behind after it accelerated out of sight. Here's one more fun detail that Dr. Wood shared with the Los Angeles Times in 1997. It's about how many different kinds of extraterrestrials are visiting Earth.

I'd say there are several civilizations that might be involved based on the in-depth interrogation of witnesses who are willing to go on record. Extraterrestrial societies could be better at some things, such as propulsion, but that wouldn't make them necessarily better in ethics. There's significant evidence that people have been abducted, but for the most part, the interest seems to be one of curiosity and seeking understanding. So for all you debunkers, here's the first rock for you to throw at Chan Thomas. He was part of a research project with a bunch of goofy physicists and real wackadoodles at McDonnell Douglas. Just a total carnival of tin foil hat hijinks. You know, a real deep state hootenanny. Oh, oops. Wait, those are my eyes rolling right out of my head. Hang on, hang on. Just give me a second to pop them back in. Done.

Okay, where were we? McDonnell Douglas. So Chan Thomas was a believer in UFOs and also a self-proclaimed psychic. But before you dismiss him as an attention-seeking huckster, you might want to know that as far back as 1962, he was considered a world authority on cataclysmic geology. And what exactly is that? Cataclysmic geology is a geological theory that works like this. Rather than by slow and gradual processes, the Earth's surface is shaped and formed by abrupt violent events. Another word for this is catastrophism, as in catastrophe.

Is there any proof of this being real? Well, yes. Look at the fossil record. There are multiple instances of sudden extinctions, like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. There's an example almost everyone knows. But you don't need an asteroid for an extinction level cataclysm. Super volcanic eruptions would also get the job done. And the sun could take us out with a massive gamma ray burst. There are multiple ways that all evidence of human civilization could be scrubbed from the face of the Earth and much more quickly than you can imagine. Dr. Chan Thomas believed all of that and that all of that had already happened on Earth multiple times and will happen again. Just part of an unthinkably vast cycle of destruction and renewal. Within three hours, the wall of water moves across the continent, burying the wind ravaged land under two miles of seething water coast to coast. In a fraction of a day, all vestiges of civilization are gone. And the great cities Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, New York are legends. Barely a stone is left where millions walked just a few hours before. The Adam and Eve story is what Chan Thomas believes is the true history of our planet and our species. In 1962, Thomas explained his theory at a meeting of the Scientific Research Society of America. Thomas spoke on movements of the Earth's crust and the resultant relocation of the Earth's magnetic poles, saying the Earth's crust has wandered or tumbled many times in the past, placing the North Pole at areas in the Arctic Ocean, the Sudan Basin, Hudson Bay, the Caspian Sea, and Wisconsin. Each tumble, which could have occurred in as little as one half or one quarter of a day, resulted in the fall of civilizations flourishing at the time.

A few lucky ones who managed to find shelter from the screaming wind on the lee side of Pike's Peak watched the sea of molten fire break through the quaking valleys below. The raging waters follow, piling higher and higher and higher, steaming over the molten earth fire and rising almost to their feet. Only great mountains such as this can withstand the cataclysmic onslaught.

Chan Thomas didn't set out to write a doomsday thriller that the CIA would disappear. He was serious in his conviction that the world has ended many times over, and that the world ending was actually a completely natural and inevitable process. There was, he said, proof of his theory embedded in all the world's religions, in the myths and fables that humans have passed down one generation to the next, and of course, buried deep in the Earth itself.

A 60 mile thick molten layer lying 60 miles below the Earth's crust was responsible for what Thomas called the tumbling of the planet's crust. Tumbling as in the massive seismic activity resulting from the dramatic shifting of Earth's magnetic poles. In Thomas's lifetime, and up till fairly recently, this was considered sort of crackpot pseudoscience and a conspiracy theory. But we know better now.

It turns out that Chan's science was correct, though you might wish it wasn't once you know more. The magnetic poles aren't the same as the geographical poles, which means the North Pole, home of Santa Claus and the flying reindeer, is a fixed point. The North Pole is where the Earth's meets the Earth's surface. It never moves. Ditto for the South Pole, a barren and desolate place with no native plants or animals or toy making elves. But Earth's magnetic poles, that's a whole different story. When you use a compass, it's magnetic north you're looking for. And magnetic north moves around quite a bit. Here's why. Of the four layers that make up our planet, the layer closest to the surface of the crust, which is thin and brittle and broken into giant pieces and spots, we call the broken pieces tectonic plates, which actually move, although very, very slowly, only about an inch or two per year. The next level down is the mantle. It begins about 18 miles beneath the surface, which doesn't sound like that crazy a distance. Yet it's a place humans have never been. The deepest hole humans have ever managed to dig is called the Cola Super Deep Borehole. We got a bit over eight miles down before the drill got stuck in rock and the whole project was ultimately abandoned. Next is the outer core. Now imagine a vast ocean of churning molten iron and nickel. The heat that makes it molten comes from the radioactive decay of the natural elements thorium and uranium. The turbulence and churning caused by all that molten metal sloshing around generates electrical currents that create the Earth's magnetic field.

Hold on to something because here's what science says about that. Yeah, so somehow the Earth's field reverses every 200 or 300,000 years or however many hundreds of thousands of years for reasons that are somehow connected to this outer core. Science is working to figure out why it's just a thing that happens for reasons. OK, very reassuring. And that brings us to the final layer of our planet, which is a solid metal ball about 758 miles in diameter, smaller than the moon. It's really hot, almost as hot as the surface of the sun.

It spins really fast, faster than even the Earth itself. In 1966, Chan Thomas, who was, remember, a geologist, explained it this way to a group called the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. Within the Earth, below the layer on which many of us pay taxes and raise our families, there is a 60 mile deep layer of lava. On occasion, some explosion is energized within the core of the Earth. Then all hell breaks loose. The crust of this planet slips suddenly as an orange peel would if it were loose. The north and south poles descend to the equators and the equators go to where the poles were. This process taking place at speeds of a thousand miles per hour with violent winds and rains from the sea traveling east and west. The local press covered Thomas's speech under the headline Earth to be destroyed again. Don't sell your stocks.

Dr. Thomas stated when this twist to end all twists is over, there are only a small handful of residents left on the planet. Several thousand years ago, all that remained were Adam and Eve and the 12 Indians up on Cheyenne Mountain. Hands went up. Adam and Eve, for real? Thomas took time to note that Adam and Eve were in reality two persons from the Mayan nation who came through this spectacular event some 6,500 years ago. As for the Indians, he said they scrambled to the top of the present home of NORAD and were all that survived at the time. Those 12 later became the progenitors of the Indian tribes of the southwest as we know them today. NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Cheyenne Mountain, a triple peak beauty near Colorado Springs, more than 9,500 feet above sea level and hidden deep inside what we believe is America's most secure military installation. Thomas also told his audience that night that our civilization was far from the first or even the most advanced to exist on Earth.

15,000 years ago, he said, there was another civilization thriving on our planet, one far ahead of our own, at least in terms of certain technologies. Thomas said this lost civilization had mastered space travel and was engaged in space warfare. Then he threw in that UFOs were absolutely real, that society's haves were working overtime to strip the have-nots of every last penny. This rings true for sure. And that the safest place to be when the Earth's poles again pulled their inevitable shift was a small triangle of land in Nairobi. Then he chuckled and declared that when the end comes next, the survivor would probably be some nut in the corn belt who decided to build an ark. The shifting of Earth's magnetic poles. That's a real thing that happens. And just this past January, scientists announced that something unexpected is happening.

Something that matters to you in all kinds of ways, even if humanity doesn't get wiped off the map. Okay, for example, the magnetic North Pole is critical to GPS. And GPS is something we rely on now for everything from aviation to shipping to the military to DoorDash. You may be an old school navigator with your trusty paper maps, but most of the rest of the world is dependent on GPS, which is tied to the Earth's magnetic field, which is now behaving in a way we can't explain.

We've been tracking magnetic North ever since its discovery in 1831 by the explorer James Clark Ross. We've known since then that magnetic North likes to wander. And for the past 100 years, we've watched it accelerate its wandering from Canada to Russia. What began as a journey of approximately six miles per year, jumped to as much as 31 miles per year at the beginning of the 2000s.

And then what happened? The movement of magnetic North slowed down, way down, the biggest drop in speed since scientists began tracking it. Which means what exactly? That's just it. We don't really know. It's a puzzle for science. We know that the magnetic field has weakened in Canada, but it's gotten stronger in Siberia, which is what's tugging magnetic North toward Russia.

Why is this happening? Again, unknown, unless it's part of the overall weakening of Earth's the past two centuries, which is a fact. And how much weaker? About 9%. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a lot. It's this pattern, a gradually diminishing magnetic field that leads some geophysicists to speculate that we might be approaching another geomagnetic reversal.

In other words, Earth's North and South magnetic poles might be getting ready to trade places, which we know has happened before, about 780,000 years ago. But predicting when it might happen again, that'd be nothing but a guess, according to science. Noah, Adam and Eve, Vishnu, Osiris, what do they have in common? They represent eras ages apart, and yet somehow they all join hands in the next cataclysm and walk with us. This is the central premise of Chan's book. The Earth remaking itself time and time again over eons, all as a result of natural processes, which sounds as lovely and calm as a TV commercial for Douche, except these natural processes lead to mass extinction events, whole advanced civilizations wiped out, some of them as technologically advanced as our own, perhaps as Chan-Thomas believed, more advanced than our own.

But if that were true, there would be evidence. That's what we think, right? Evidence of advanced technologies, even if only as scraps, right? This idea of a vanished technological civilization is called the Silurian hypothesis. Fans of Dr. Who get the reference, and you're right, that is how it got its name. The concept was presented in 2018 by an astrophysicist named Adam Frank, along with Gavin Schmidt, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

And before we start digging for artifacts, there are a few very important things to know. The ongoing debate over how long complex life has existed on Earth. Most experts agree that animal life showed up around 653 million years ago. But with time and new tools come new findings. Sediment cores drilled from deep in rock found in the country of Gabon show all the environmental conditions needed for animal life 2.1 billion years ago. And then there's the problem of fossilization. Only the tiniest fraction of life makes it to the fossil stage, because there are just so many variables. Habitat. In a tropical or forest environment, the rates of fossilization are low. Biological material decomposes and disappears. Go to an arid environment, and that story changes.

The rate of fossilization is still low, but the chances of bone or hard shell turning to stone are much higher. And while it might seem like we have a gazillion dinosaur fossils floating around, we don't. Of all the dinosaurs who ever roamed, for all the millions of years that Earth belonged to them, we only have a few thousand near-complete fossil specimens. And here's another way to think about it. Once upon a time, there were about 1.7 billion T-Rexes. We don't have even a hundred fossilized versions. That's because the conditions needed to make a fossil are pretty extreme.

The animal has to die in the right place, at the right time, and have its body buried or covered by sediment so that no other animals drag it off or eat it. If you're looking for fossil records of Homo sapiens, that's us. Well, the science shows that we haven't been around long to have left any, technologically advanced or otherwise. Now, let's talk about objects.

Shouldn't we be able to dig up, you know, something? Here's where it gets trippy. The surface of the Earth as we know it, see it, and map it, has only been the surface of the Earth for about 2.6 million years. This period of time, the one we're living in, is called the Quaternary. One of its nicknames is the Age of Humans. Here's a dizzying thought. These last 2.6 million years account for about 0.1% of geologic time. That's less than a blink. And in the future, only a handful of the Earth's soil we walk on and drive on will be preserved as rocks on the surface.

That's just how it works. So, as hard as it is to imagine, much of what lies far beneath our feet and our oceans was once in the sunlight, in the wind. Less than 10 years ago, a team of researchers from Kiel University in Germany and the British Antarctic Survey used satellite data to locate a cluster of continents hidden deep below Antarctica. Leftover continents from millions of years ago. Tectonic plates and whole regions of those plates folded up on themselves. The result of massively powerful geological forces molding and reshaping the surface of the Earth. Then, there's the lost continent of Greater Adria. About 240 million years ago, it broke off from the supercontinent of Gondwana and started drifting north. It was about the size of Greenland, just minding its business, collecting sediments and watching time turn them into rock, floating in a tropical sea, when it slammed into what we now call Europe. That crash went down 100-120 million years ago. Greater Adria got shoved underneath Europe with just the tiniest fraction of Greater Adria's rocks left on the surface for anyone to discover. Rocks that were scattered across more than 30 different countries. I ran to Spain. And now for the cool part, scientists are actually able to study the magnetic field of ancient Earth, thanks to evidence trapped inside those rocks. That drift northward that led to the collision with Europe, not linear. Rather than simply moving north with no change in its orientation, Greater Adria spun counterclockwise as it jostled and scraped past other tectonic plates.

Although the tectonic collision happened at speeds of no more than three to four centimeters per year, the inexorable smash-up shattered the 100 kilometer thick bit of crust and sent most of it deep within the Earth's mantle. The study is not the only evidence for Greater Adria as a lost continent. Other researchers who use seismic waves to generate computerized tomography-like images of structures deep within the Earth have created an atlas of the underworld. A graveyard of slabs of crust that have sunk into the mantle. This research shows that portions of Greater Adria are 1,500 kilometers. That's more than 930 miles below the surface.

Humans have never been able to dig any deeper than like nine miles at the most. For the sake of argument, let's say there was an advanced civilization that was plowed under by the kind of geological cataclysm that Chan Thomas is talking about. And let's say the remnants of that civilization now rest 30 miles beneath the ocean floor or 12 miles below what's now the surface. See the problem? How could we know what's down there? We can't get that deep.

But let's go the other way and say, okay, okay, there was an advanced civilization that was scrubbed off the Earth by a geological cataclysm. The remnants were buried by tons of silt and sediment that's gradually being eroded by time and weather. What remnants might survive thousands of years and ultimately resurface? Well, when it comes to making an object immortal, stone rocks.

Check this out. A collection of stone tools found in Kenya date to 3.3 million years ago. And they weren't made or used by human hands. Those tools belong to an ancient race of hominids or distant cousins who didn't make the evolutionary cut for long-term survival. In fact, much of what we do have from ancient civilizations has been preserved in stone.

Like for a famous example, the Parthenon, which was built somewhere between 447 and 438 BCE and still stands today as a backdrop for a gazillion vacation pics. And how about the Pyramids of Giza, 4,500 years old. We think the pyramids are possibly even older than that. In our time, we associate advanced technology with metal. So how does that fare over eons? Not very well, it turns out. Anything made from iron or copper will eventually break down. It's a slow process, but at the end, all you have is rust. Gold is the best bet, and look how many ancient solid gold objects have survived millennia. The oldest piece of processed gold found so far is a tiny golden bead unearthed in Bulgaria, and it's 6,500 years old.

Gold has real staying power. But how many solid golden objects are in your house, or your town for that matter? What about ceramics and pottery? Fragile, sure, but durable? Definitely. Pottery found at Lake Unanuma in Honshu, Japan has been dated at 18,000 years old. Wind and water and light take their toll on ceramics, but even broken pieces can survive for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Glass has been part of human life since at least the first century BCE, when glass blowing techniques were perfected to the point that glass vessels could be produced in big numbers. Fragile as glass is, it's not surprising that intact pieces are rare, but fragments are another story. The oldest known fragments date all the way back to the 16th century BCE. Wood, paper, leather, how long did those artifacts survive? Starting with wood, not long. Wood needs some pretty exceptional conditions if it wants to the long haul. Back in 2023, archaeologists working in Zambia discovered evidence of the world's oldest wooden structure, cut and formed using stone tools about 476,000 years ago.

If you're following the math, this is yet another artifact that predates Homo sapiens, us, and is a relic of some other long gone predecessor of modern humans. Now for paper, the oldest known piece of paper made of mostly cotton was found in China and they've dated that to about 150 AD. That's not counting the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are even more ancient because those were etched on parchment, which is made from animal hide and even copper. Though some of the texts were made of papyrus reed, which ends up being similar to thick kind of paper we're more accustomed to. And as for leather, in 2008 we did find a 5,500 year old leather shoe in a cave in Armenia. Every artifact we've ever found, every object you've ever seen in a museum or on the internet, was found on or very near the surface of the earth.

Our history, as we understand it, is based entirely on what we can document and measure. We can't know what we don't know and we can't look in the places we can't go. The deepest parts of our ocean, the ground miles beneath our feet, continents that are folded and buckled and shoved underneath other continents. This is what British journalist and author Graham Hancock is getting at in his work. Maybe that name rings a bell because you watched Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix. Hancock's take on the geological cataclysm goes like this. About 13,000 years ago, a highly advanced civilization was obliterated due to the devastating impact of comets slamming into the earth. There were survivors, though, and they passed what knowledge they could onto packs of far more primitive hunters and gatherers. These were the seeds that flowered into the early civilizations we do know about, like Sumeria in ancient Egypt, for example. But none of this explains why the CIA pounced on Chan Thomas' book. Unless you adjust your tinfoil hat and take one big step back to see the bigger picture. Social control. It would be incredibly upsetting for the general public to think that at any moment the earth itself could turn chaotic on a scale that would swallow humanity and erase every single thing we've ever accomplished as though we never existed. People tend to recoil from that kind of thing, understandably. Plus, the human brain isn't wired to comprehend either deep time or our own extinction. We're just not built for it.

So we make like Elsa. We let it go. But I don't think that's what had the CIA in a dither. World annihilating catastrophism is easy to dismiss as pseudoscience and conspiratorial thinking. Both Chan Thomas and Graham Hancock could tell you all about that. No, what I think triggered the CIA was Thomas' assertion that Adam and Eve were actually Mayan, survivors of an early cataclysm. Thomas argued that the biblical tale of Adam and Eve was actually a symbolic representation of how the world and humanity recovered and was reborn after a global geological cataclysm. You don't need to even read between the lines to arrive at this conclusion. Thomas goes through the book of Genesis line by line, verse by verse, to interpret the scripture through the lens of his own theory. Did you understand that there are three cataclysms recorded in the Bible? Noah's, Adam and Eve's, and the one before that? The one before that? Before Adam and Eve? Before God even made the world? Chan Thomas say, what?

This is what we're taught in Sunday school. In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, let there be light. And there was light. What the CIA read in Chan Thomas' book didn't exclude God from the story, but...

In the beginning, the universe was created in God's design. Included was our sun and our planet earth. And during one of the many cataclysms that occurred during the earth's history, the lands were inundated with raging waters and ravaged by horrendous winds. The oceans were all dark with muddiness and the ill wind thundered over the troubled waters also. Close enough, right? And it is kind of. When you read Thomas' version of the book of Genesis, it's very familiar.

God taking six days to make the world and resting on the seventh, creating humankind in God's image and granting them dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every other living thing that crawled or walked, et cetera, et cetera. Thomas just added in the parts about the cycle repeating over and over. Cataclysm after cataclysm, the earth continually being destroyed and resurrected. Civilizations rising and then being erased. Adam and Eve, not God's first human creations, but a pair of traumatized survivors of catastrophe. Did the CIA fear that if people thought it was natural planetary forces and not the fist of Jehovah that dictated whether or not we were all drowned in a flood or burned in an earthquake, that we might become restless, dissatisfied with our lives of working from sunup to sundown, paying taxes, following all rules necessary to keep a society functioning, that if enough of us came to believe that if we had so little control anyway, that we might as well just live however we pleased and what little time was given us. Religion is one of humanity's most powerful tools of social control. A people untethered from faith might come to believe that since nothing matters for all eternity, that nothing matters right now. Smoke them if you got them. Party like it's the end of the world as we know it and you feel fine. No judgment, no heaven, no hell, just you alive and taking what you please. The word for that is nihilism. And the next stop is anarchy. And was that the fear?

Was that what compelled the CIA to smother Thomas's book? Only 50 pages of Chan Thomas's book were released. The other 200 plus disappeared, mostly disappeared, at least for a long time. Amazon has multiple versions for sale. One is 41 pages. Another is 169 pages. You can snap up a signed copy for $3,000 on eBay. I found and downloaded a version with 208 pages. Thanks DuckDuckGo, of course. Who even knows where or if a complete copy of the book exists, as Chan Thomas intended it. Thomas had a few things to say in conclusion that resonate right now in uncomfortable ways. Greed has so invaded civilization that it has caused severe degradation of both the government and the finance industry. And so degraded industry that disregard of both laws and common sense as practice concerning the infusion of terrible pollutants into and onto our planet in the interest of profit. That was problematic for the CIA in the 1960s.

And it's an even more problematic stance in 2025, when people are openly advocating for the logging of old growth forests on our public lands, for oil drilling and resource mining in our national parks. The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced plans for huge rollbacks of regulations, rules protecting everything from clean air and water to wildlife.

Behavioral, moral, social, and religious standards are deteriorating at a rate never before seen in written history. Terrorism is now a tool of the church and the state. The only comparable period is the seven centuries of the Inquisition, when that period of deterioration was through degradation of religious authority. Thomas wrote that in the 1960s. He died before seeing just how much worse all of that would become in the digital era with the spread of propaganda and disinformation. Maybe the CIA just didn't want to expose the public to that kind of thinking back in 1965. But when it comes to the motives or the agenda of the CIA, that's anyone's guess.

Thomas's book isn't a cautionary tale. One, because there's simply nothing to be done to prevent a geological cataclysm. Whether you believe that the shifting of the Earth's magnetic poles are the cause or not. Sure, we could be better stewards of the planet right now. Thomas makes that point. Take care of it the way we care for our homes, even though we know they're not going to last forever. It's just more pleasant to keep them nice while we're here living in them. And as much as it might seem that Thomas has a bone to pick with religion, I don't think that's the case. If anything, Thomas sees God as working a much bigger, much broader canvas than our tiny patch of existence. I'll tell you what else Thomas's book isn't. It isn't a how-to guide on avoiding extinction, because that, in Thomas's view, would be completely pointless.

Instead, Thomas is almost cheerful about the prospect of the Earth turning itself inside out, of a transformation that kicks most of humanity to the curb. A cataclysm accomplishes many things. It stops unbridled and irresponsible reproduction, being the best population regulator known. It reshuffles all the Earth's natural resources.

It stops the worldwide pollution of our planet and provides for the restoration of pure water in lakes, rivers, and oceans. It provides for the restoration of forests and rainforests the world over and stops man's process of dehumanizing himself with narcotics, mass crime, and terrible authority. Some people believe that it was Thomas's work with the U.S. government and military that brought his book to the attention of the CIA, that Thomas had knowledge not meant for the general public, knowledge that led him to write the book, that the book was a warning of some kind.

It's hard to find any real proof to support that, but again, when it comes to the CIA, it's best to keep an open mind, especially when you're dealing with the CIA of the Cold War era. From LSD to mind control, that was one extra twisted pack of spooks. Since we started the story with the world ending in a matter of hours, let's finish on a much more cheerful note. Let's give Chan Thomas the last word and let him tell us why having the world periodically wiped out might actually be the best thing ever.

Above all, cataclysm gives mankind a chance to start over once more and this time to do it right without intellectual or spiritual imprisonments. Next time on True Weird Stuff, imagine stumbling across the carcass of a woolly mammoth, perfectly preserved in the permafrost. There's the shaggy reddish brown coat, the trunk, the ivory tusks as big around as a telephone pole. What lies before you is a majestic specimen, a prehistoric animal gone from this world for at least 4,000 years.

And your first thought is, I'm gonna eat that. People, bring your appetite to the next True Weird Stuff of Mammoth East. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Don Morgan, and Sam Moore. Sherry, when you were doing this, what I was thinking about was something that the Buddhists say, Buddhists say that everything is temporary. And when you think about it, you know, everything, this, when you look at this, you go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's true everywhere. You know, it's not just true with things, events that happen in your life or people that are there or, or jobs or things you possess, you think you possess all of that. It's true universally for everything.

I mean, our planet is alive and dynamic and constantly changing. And sometimes, you know, we think that it's always so gradual, gradual, gradual. But if you've spent any time in the West, the landscape is a violent landscape. You know, the Appalachian and the Great Smoky Mountains, those are ancient mountains, and they're rounded and curved and, and gentle, but filled with deep mystery, right? The Rocky Mountains and like the Wasatch and the Tetons, these are, these are harsh, violent, jagged peaks, you know, that you can see the evidence of the earth being violently moved, and the layers are right in front of you, like when you're in the deserts in Utah and Arizona, New Mexico, it's like you're reading the earth's history in the landscape. So we don't like to think of it that way. Because that's kind of trippy, right? We prefer to think the earth as a calm old lady that doesn't move too fast. But that's an illusion. So that's, that's the, that's the real deal. That's real deal science right there. And I don't know, like I'm fascinated by the Graham Hancock stuff. And I'm fascinated by the idea that there could have potentially been advanced civilizations that came before ours. And for the longest time, I thought it's a cool idea, but surely we would have found something by now. But when you step back and realize that we can barely dig, like we can't, we can't dig a big enough, deep enough hole. What I've been thinking about is, you know, you and I have talked many times on different episodes about how much of the sea and what is in the ocean is unexplored. And we've never talked about the fact that what is right beneath our feet is unexplored as well. We've never talked about that before. And all of the stuff that you're saying in here does make sense, especially, you know, the sun could wipe us out. I mean, the sun could have something that could wipe us all out and everything would be gone. You know, that's in an instant, in an instant, that's one of the things that happens.

What's really fascinating is we keep on learning so much about what has happened in past history. We had an idea that in North and South America, that civilizations came to be like at a certain date, whatever that date was. They're now finding that it was much longer ago than that. So now we're just discovering something that's new just with that. Leave all the tectonic plates and else moving around. They're realizing that because what's happening to the rainforest in South America, they are discovering evidence of civilizations that they didn't know about.

And these are all like this. I understand. I understand how scary this sounds. And I haven't yet dropped the scariest breaking news bombshell on you yet. I understand how scary this is. And the debunking and the pushback on this is coming from a place of fear. Absolutely no one, me included, wants to see a wall of water coming toward me and know that I have three seconds left.

Although I have days. I'm not as opposed as I once was. I thought I went, well, you know, at least it would be fast, right? Yeah. I mean, I understand that it's frightening. It's so frightening, in fact, that the CIA prevented this book from being released. Sit with that for a second, because this is scary stuff. But you know what's even scarier? Let me tell you what's even scarier. A former official who worked under President George Bush came forward very recently. So depending on when you're listening to this episode, early May 2025, this official came forward. He says former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and said that the United States government had spent trillions of dollars, $21 trillion to be exact, on an underground doomsday base meant to survive an extinction level event. There's an underground base, there's an underground city infrastructure, there's a transportation system linking these bases. And apparently, this former official said that it all started, her investigation began, when she couldn't help but notice that about $21 trillion had sort of disappeared from the Pentagon budget. And she started digging.

And she said in the United States alone, there are at least 170 secret facilities. And these are for the elites to survive an extinction level event that is ready on the horizon. Hmm. So there are a number, there's a lot of like, rabbit hole. I don't mean like, I don't really like the phrase conspiracy theory here. But there's a bunch of rabbit hole churning on the internet and various corners about this, this weird anomalous behavior of the Earth's magnetic poles, and suggesting that they're getting ready to do one of those massive switcheroo's that is an extinction level event, right? So you can find that I'm not just tap, tap a few words into a search engine and boom, you'll you'll be gone for hours. So there's that. But then there's also some concern about the the accelerating negative effects of unchecked climate change, which boy, that's a phrase that'll trigger my children's father if I ever want him to collect the life insurance, I just knock on his door, unchecked climate change, and his head erupts. And then of course, nuclear proliferation, which we touched on in our doomsday clock episode, and terrorism, which Chan Thomas touched on in the Adam and Eve story. And, you know, the whole idea that perhaps our galactic overlords have had enough of our wonky bullshit, ready to set the earth and try again. Pick one, pick them all. And Sherry, we're gonna break here. But I have a connection from when I was in first grade to something that appeared in this story.

Oh, yeah. Okay, what I have, that has a connection to what appeared in this story involves the magnetic North Pole. Now, I had no idea until I heard you say this, in reading this, that the magnetic part of it had decreased. That's what you had said, right? Yeah, yeah. When I was in first grade, the first science experiment I had was to take a sewing needle, rub it on a magnet, set it in a cup of water, and then the needle would point north.

That was the experiment. So you bet you didn't know. And look at you, and you remember it. Sure, yeah, I do. I remember that. Because I can remember my father rubbing the needle. But I do remember that. And so what's interesting about that is that this little science experiment I had there totally depended on that magnetic north in order for that to work.

And now that is starting to decrease at, I would say, an alarming rate. Yes, very much so. And it fluctuates, right? I mean, this is something that we know about the magnetic poles is that they do fluctuate. And they fluctuate because they're being generated by all that sloshy business deep, deep, deep in the core of our planet.

And these are natural forces, right, Max? Right. Like, this isn't some like, ooh, there's some mad scientist in a laboratory. Bitches, y'all are meat and stardust living on a rock. And like, all kinds of things are happening as a result. And there's no point in being angry about that. It's just the way that it is. And chances are, you'll live your whole life, your whole natural lifespan, without, you know, being swallowed by a geological cataclysm.

But it's going to happen to somebody. And you know why we know that? Because it's already happened so many times in the past, and we can prove it. The Earth is not going to settle down, you know, take an exedra and be cool. The Earth is going to continue to do what the Earth is doing. And there are a lot of people who believe and you may not be one of them. But there are a lot of people that believe that something is imminent. And they are troubled by the building of these bunkers that the elites are investing a fortune in. And didn't we cover that in our episode on bunkers and the Greenbrier? There's a company out of Virginia called SAFE. It's an acronym that stands for strategically armored and fortified environments. They have just revealed their plans to build a $300 million luxury members only doomsday bunker bunker with medical care powered by AI luxury and protection blended as it's never been blended before. You in order to get into this bunker, each person must pay a $20 million membership fee. Do they get a members only jacket with that too? That's extra.

When you said members only, that's all I can think. So I mean, these are all real things that are really happening. We already know that people like Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Meta, Facebook, Instagram threads, building an elaborate bunker in Hawaii, Peter Thiel, who owns PayPal. I mean, that's not make believe. That's real.

And they're not even keeping it a secret. But Sherry, the thing about this is some of this stuff could happen so quickly, you wouldn't have time to get on a private jet, fly to Hawaii and get in your bunker, you know? No, not for the geological cataclysm. But you can be sure that these individuals will have more of a heads up than you or I do on a manmade cataclysmic event.

They would know before we did that we were back to a real nuclear nightmare, Bay of Pigs sort of situation. They will know before you do. So I really wrestled with this one. Because on the one hand, it's so scary. And on the other hand, you have to almost say, okay, whatever, who cares? I have no control over this. I just have to live my little life and hope for the best. And if it does happen, it'll be so fast. I mean, did you hear the description of how rapidly the entire continental United States would be just wiped out? Wiped out with no evidence. That was the thing that was kind of spooky about that, because I had never thought about that before. When you talked about fossils and the things that we rely on for evidence of life prior to us, that those things will be wiped out too. It does make you wonder how many times this perhaps has happened. Fossils, every fossil, including a fossil of an ancient prehistoric snail, every fossil we have is a miracle.

Because when you think about how many millions of T-Rexes roamed, and yet, what do we really have? What do we really have to show for it? The circumstances that you need to create a fossil are extremely specific and finicky in particular. Every fossil is a miracle. We, every day, we're learning something new about pre-human civilizations. Like, for example, and I just, I didn't know we were going to talk about this. I'm going to pull it up on my screen. Sherry, I'll just tell you real quick. This is another science experiment that I had, or a science fair project I had in school, the making of fossils that I recreated with plaster of Paris, making an indentation that got hard, putting Vaseline in it, pouring more plaster of Paris in, and then you get the fossil.

See, so this episode must really be speaking to you. It is. In your early childhood experience. When I saw this, I went, well, what am I going to have to say about this? But yeah, and I remember that. Well, it wasn't too long ago. It was very recently that this weird and very mysterious puzzling jawbone was found on the seafloor off the coast of Taiwan, and they were able to, it's a human jawbone, and they were able to use this test, this sort of cutting edge technique that analyzes proteins to try to figure out where did this jawbone come from? It's not human. It's not Neanderthal. It's Denisovan, which is one of the other pre-human hominid races that lived and thrived for a time and then vanished. What we know about anything, you could fit into a Dixie cup when you think about the great, vast geological span of time. And when I imagine like the continents that are folded and buckled and tucked up underneath Europe and Antarctica, some people on the internet, and I love these people, are like, these are secret alien bases.

I'm not saying they're not. I'm not saying they're not. But if there was an entire advanced civilization with wood, leather, paper, metal, stone objects that was buckled and curved on itself and tucked a thousand miles beneath the surface of the earth you walk on, my brother, they could have whole rocket ships under there. One, you're never going to be able to get to them.

And two, you heard here what is likely to survive the kind of millennia that we're talking about. It's not much. And we don't like that as human beings and I'll tell you why. We struggle with the notion of our own mortality because we are not built to comprehend our own extinction, our own individual death. We're not built for it. But we like to take comfort in the fact that our works, the things that we make and create will outlive us.

But you know, eventually, the sun's going to like expand and swallow the planet. I mean, at some point, like why even do your homework, right? Like nothing matters. But that's what scared the CIA. Because do you really want vast swaths of the population walking around going, nothing matters? No. Yeah. No. Because as you said, that's anarchy.

Yeah. I mean, what makes us behave? Some of us nothing makes us behave. But by and large, what makes us behave? The rule of law, fear of eternal damnation, the judgment of our neighbors. And can I just say that I know what a nihilist is. I've never met one. And the only time I've seen them portrayed in film is in The Big Lebowski. So which is an excellent example, which is it is if so, if you want to know what a nihilist is, rental, stream, you know, rental, Big Lebowski. Somebody said to me, a friend of mine said to me recently, do you find that by the time you guys finish max finish a true weird stuff episode that you've managed to convince yourself that whatever crazy nonsense you're writing about is real?

No, no, I think that all of this is very plausible. I don't think this is nonsense at all. I think this is all very plausible. It's just not the type of thing that people sit down and have polite conversation about at a cocktail party. Oh, trust me, don't I know it. I learned that the hard way, which is which is why those of us that work that work together at our day job, we usually gravitate towards one another when we're at some sort of social function, because we're the only ones that can put up with each other. I'm having dinner and drinks with my sister, wife, and our friends, Jim and court who live in Northern California and Charles.

We're talking about San Francisco because Jim and court live, they live in outside San Francisco up near Napa. We're talking about some of the things that have happened to San Francisco. It's one of the great cities of the world and it's got a lot of problems now as so many places do. I was like, oh, oh, oh, you guys, do you want to hear my favorite San Francisco fun fact?

They were like, of course. I was like, there are only two cemeteries in San Francisco. You're not allowed to get buried in San Francisco. You have to go to Colma, which is 10 miles away. And Colma is what we call a necropolis. There are about one and a half to one point six million graves in Colma, but only 2000 people.

What a day trip that would be. So what was the response to that, Sherry? They were surprised to hear this information and excited they're going to go to Colma and report back to us, Max. Oh, and I was like, you know, the seawall at like the harbor, the aquatic harbor where the the sailing yacht club thing is, that's it's made out of old tombstones because once upon a time there were dozens of cemeteries in San Francisco and they passed a law and all of those bodies were dug up and moved and relocated to Colma, except no, they weren't, which is why even to this day, people doing construction and renovating homes and businesses in San Francisco routinely turn up human bones and remains.

The episode we did on that is called Rest in Peace. So yeah, obviously, Max, I'm not really anyone's favorite party guest. But there's something as terrifying as Chan Thomas's theory is there's something weirdly comforting about the idea that like our little lives, you know, but the earth remakes itself. And then here comes the next wave of people to take a shot.

And if you're a person of faith, right, this shouldn't trouble you at all. You already know you're going to die and you already know where you think or hope where you're going next, right? If you believe in reincarnation, yeah, what else? Now, this is terrifying. If you're if you're a person riddled with extreme anxiety, who has not yet made peace with the fact that you're not immortal. I can see how that would be. Yeah, scary as hell. Yeah, because I'm not I'm not confronting it. But I could go out and get in a car accident and die tomorrow. But death is not something that I particularly fear. It's not something that goes in the back of my mind and says, oh, my God, what's going to happen then? First of all, I have no control about it. But the other thing is, is I have great optimism about that. And my optimism with all of that stuff doesn't doesn't change my openness to what you've discussed in this episode. I mean, who knows, right? This could, this could all just be, you know, nutty. It's just it gets your attention that the CIA yanked this book. Well, that is the part of this, of course, that makes that so interesting, because you're going, well, do you have more information? Why were parts of this taken out all of the things that you discussed in the story? So I think that that is that is very interesting as well.

Unless somebody just got into was a control freak and just said, if this information gets out, it'll be anarchy. But, but I really that's it. But sit with that for a second, because it's very possible you always have to remember that during the Cold War, how many episodes have we done on the CIA and how batshit the CIA was they've done in that period of time, they've done some batshit stuff, cuckoo cuckoo. So it all it would take is one person with a position of authority in the Central Intelligence Agency. One person who found this entire book and this theory of geological cataclysm, offensive to his personal belief system, that person would have enough power to make this book disappear. And that's, that's a thing that we do see play out, how one person can shape the entire historical narrative based on their own beliefs or fears or doubts or insecurities or weird desires, or one group of people, like the pure.

And like, we think of ourselves like the arrogance, like humanity, we are adorable. We're, we're like a little purse dog that barks at every German shepherd and pit bull because it thinks it's a badass. We're so small, and so insignificant. And we have such an outlandishly grandiose notion of our own gifts and importance. Well, we think that if we can't find it, it's because it don't exist.

Please, please, but the thing that I look at kind of on the other side of that is we are indeed here. And there's something about that, that to me is very heartening. You say, yes, we're insignificant and small. And it's just a little speck of time. But it makes you realize that from a personal standpoint, I need not get wound up with my little resentments, or my, my, whatever it is that I'm wasting my energy on, and focus it on something that's, that's more important. So true.

Look at the way, like, we're given this really, truly magnificent world to occupy. We have like, we have pink birds that stand on one leg, and we have waterfalls. And we have frogs that if you lick them, you hallucinate. We've got mountains and rivers and puppies and baby cows. We just, we live in a miracle. And we spend the minute that we have on this miracle, spinning our wheels with pointless nonsense, making ourselves and the people around us so miserable. And for what?

For what? For what? You know, it's funny, you talk about that. But as simple as going when I go out and hike, and I get out there, and it's really quiet. And all of a sudden, I notice the vegetation that's close to the ground, that's really beautiful. There's there's insects that are fascinating. There's animals, there's all kinds of things that when I slow down, when I slow myself down, and I take a look at that stuff, I realize how much wonder stuff there is around us.

And that it's worth pausing to appreciate it, right? Enjoy it and be grateful that you lived and that you got to experience the wonders that you did. As opposed to just holding yourself in a little anger ball and making everybody else miserable, because there's a good chance you're going to get swallowed, you're definitely going to die. You definitely you are absolutely going to die someday. And hopefully it'll be in your sleep and not in a geological cataclysm.

But either way, it's the same outcome, right? That so and so he died peacefully to sleep. The other people in the car were not so happy. They're not screaming in terror, like his passengers. So you know, what it really comes down to is, you know, you keep an open mind, you look at it, you go, that's interesting. You know, the magnetic north has been drifting across Canada into Siberia. That's a real provable scientific fact. And that's all about it really is. Oh, what could that be all about?

Right? You look at these things. And then maybe at the end of it, you know, when your heart rate slows back down, and you get a grip from the panic of thinking about what Chan Thomas is writing about, maybe you just decide to not be such a dick, and just live the time you have left, appreciating that you're here at all. Because nobody's getting out alive as the saying goes, and if you're lucky, it won't happen. This next geological cataclysm, which will come, it will come. It won't happen on your watch. Now I have to point out that I'm early in May 2025. Didn't we have over 300 significant earthquakes?

We did in a time period where we usually would have four. Yeah. Like Mother Earth is starting to move around. She's starting to wake up from a long deep sleep. She feels a little bit restless. Does that mean a geological cataclysm? Who knows? But there's some stuff happening in the world that's worth paying attention to right now. There's some activity in the Yellowstone caldera, the so-called super volcano place. There are other rumblings and other volcanoes around the world that have been dormant for a good long time. Dormant doesn't mean dead. Dormant means sleeping or resting or sluggish. So the Earth periodically reminds us that she's alive and that it's not personal. Think of us like little tiny fleas riding on the back of an enormous dog. If the dog wakes up from a nap and stretches and gives itself a good violent shake and we get thrown off, that wasn't the dog's intention. No. It's just the thing that happened because we were small when it was big. And that's kind of how we need to look at geological cataclysm. We're very small. It's very big. We can't control it. We can't stop it. We can kind of sort of maybe think we're predicting it, but we have no way of actually being able to say with certainty that this is about to happen or that's about to happen. It's just an interesting time to be alive. And it's a wild time to be paying attention to the extreme redistribution of wealth upward and the proliferation of these doomsday bunkers that the wealthy and the elite are making no attempt to conceal from you. That's just interesting. It is.

Even though there's not a damn thing you can do about it, which is why for fun on next week's True Weird Stuff, if we're all alive, if we're here, if the cataclysm is coming, if it could come in between producing episodes, Max, so that at least we didn't do a bunch of work for nothing. Next week's episode, I will tell you, it just blows my mind how people think. There is not a scenario in the world short of near death by starvation where I would look at a 4,000-year-old piece of meat and go, I'm going to eat that. There's some stuff in my own refrigerator I'm not sure I want to eat right now. Woolly mammoths, we don't really touch on the de-extinctification of woolly mammoths, which is underway. We don't have our first baby woolly mammoth yet, but it's very, very close because the extinct woolly mammoth is very closely related to the Asian elephant who, thank God, is still alive on this planet, although definitely under threat. The so-called bringing back of the dire wolf, that was just misleading click bait.

They created something, but it's not a true dire wolf. We're going to be able to get a little bit closer to bringing back a woolly mammoth just because of the close genetic relationship. They've not been extinct very long. At the time the great pyramids of Giza were being built, woolly mammoths were alive on Earth. Did you know that?

We've talked about this before. I felt very stupid that I had never thought that elephants had existed in North America. I had no idea. The last living population of woolly mammoths was on an island in the Arctic. They were doing their thing while the pyramids were being built. That's not very long ago. And because of where the woolly mammoth lived, its natural habitat, many, many woolly mammoths have been preserved nearly completely intact down to their hair in the permafrost.

As the world gets warmer and the permafrost heats up and begins thawing, we're beginning to find more and more preserved mammoths. There's been a long for centuries of thriving trade in the ivory from prehistoric woolly mammoth tusks, which a lot of people don't realize. They know that elephant tusks are an issue and rhino horn is an issue. But I don't know if you realize that mammoth tusks are an issue. There are a very substantial number of these animals whose carcasses and remains are being found. There are a lot of wild stories, wild stories of explorers and prospectors and all sorts of folks stumbling across them in the wild, in the wilderness.

And what they decide to do with these carcasses is finger licking good. And that is on the next True Weird Stuff. So thank you very much for listening. And we just learned that True Weird Stuff, we're nominated for some other podcast awards, but we just won a gold communicators award. This award has been around for 31 years. And we just won a gold medal for the craft of writing for audio for True Weird Stuff. And the episode that won that was called Once Upon a Shroom about the CIA and how they brought psychedelic mushrooms to the American drug culture. So because you listen to this show, these cool things are happening. And one of these days, one of these cool things is going to yield a $25 gift certificate for Max to go somewhere.

One can only hope. Now, mister, you got to be patient because good things like that take time. 25 whole dollars, Sherry. I don't know. And all for you, mister. All for you. Every one of those $25 is for you. I don't have to share. Yeah. Think what you can buy with that. You can buy two dozen eggs. Yeah. So our true weirdos, you're who we're doing it for. We're so grateful to you and so appreciative. We'll see you next week. Come hungry because we're going to eat us some woolly mammoth on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff, hit our website, True Weird Stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it. And bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at True Weird Stuff dot com and follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

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